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Surprisingly I didn't see this posted anywhere here, but for those that keep up with technology news, it has been widely discussed (in tech circles at least) how cyber attacks originating from China have targeted Google, Adobe and about 30 other major companies ranging from web firms to U.S. weapons contractors. Some of those affected, besides Google and Adobe, are Yahoo, Symantec, Northrop Grumman, and Dow Chemical.

Google officials have stated that some of their source code (intellectual property and trade secrets) was stolen. Further, they say that they noticed the attackers were able to breach the gmail accounts of some Chinese freedom activists. Google is so angry about it they are threatening to completely pull out of China (which would potentially lose them billions).

These attacks were highly sophisticated; the people behind them were competent programmers and security specialists. I say that because the attackers discovered a previously unknown memory corruption vulnerability in Internet Explorer that affects all Micrsosft versions of Windows. They used this vulnerability to take over the machine as soon as someone from Google (or the other companies) clicked on a malicious web link. This vulnerability is still not patched, and might not be for a couple of weeks.

At any rate, this is big news in the corporate espionage and computer security world. This was one of the largest known cyber attacks against corporate targets in world history -- and it all came from China.

There are many articles on the web about this. Here are a couple:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-2708...5.html?tag=mncol;txt

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10435232-245.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10433538-265.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01.../asia/13beijing.html
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